PEAK
Empowering Gen Z job seekers to discover company cultural characteristics
MY ROLE: Product designer
RESPONSIBILITIES: UX/UI design
Responsive web app
8 weeks (July-August 2022): conception to MVP launch
Co.lab COHORT 13 PRODUCT MANAGER: Jenn Blunt
DEVELOPERS: Deise Costa, Andrew Enoe
What is important to you when job hunting?
I participated in the Co.Lab agile team-based program to build a product from ideation to MVP launch in eight weeks. My team consisted of a product manager, two developers, and myself, as a product designer.
We were all starting our careers or pivoting to new ones and searching for positions that aligned with our own values. We found that reliable information on the "cultural characteristics" of a company was not readily available and was time-consuming to research. We also felt companies were not transparent about the culture of their teams.
The Challenge
How can job seekers better understand a company's culture to feel confident about choosing the right employer and enhance their chances of happiness and success once they start?
PEAK is a responsive web app highlighting crowdsourced reviews of workplace culture.
PEAK allows Gen Z job seekers to quickly and easily discover reliable reviews of company culture and find their next perfect position.
Following a Double Diamond iterative framework to fully understand our problem and devise and refine a solution, we created the MVP of PEAK.
An alternative to websites like “Glassdoor” or “Indeed”
LANDING PAGE
Users can immediately search for the company they are interested in to see cultural reviews left by verified employees.
Users can leave reviews of their current employer to allow others who are job hunting to get a clear picture of the company culture.
Users will feel confident that the reviews are trustworthy and anonymous.
COMPANY PAGE
Users see the overall rating for all cultural characteristics.
Users see the individual ratings for cultural characteristics.
Each category reveals individual written reviews with the date and details of the reviewer for more context.
LEAVING A REVIEW PAGE
A reviewer’s “work” email address is required to leave a review to instill trust.
Reviews can leave their position and location for more context if they feel comfortable.
The review characteristics are broken into three categories.
Short characteristic definition statements ensure reviewers have the same understanding.
Reviewers have the option to leave a written review for each characteristic along with their star rating.
What company information is important to you?
When job hunting, what information about a prospective employer is important to you…diversity, work-life balance, remote flexibility, growth potential, etc?
How easy is it to find this information?
42% of adult Gen Z workers make cultural characteristics top priority when job hunting.
Generation Z places workplace culture high on the list of what they are looking for.
An August 2021 survey found that 42% of adult Gen Z workers make work-life balance, working from home, and flexible vacation time a top priority when job hunting.
Finding information about company culture is not easy.
Learning about company culture can be time-consuming and the information found may be vague and unreliable, requiring synthesis of information from review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, company websites, news articles, and even social media platforms.
As workplace culture becomes increasingly important...
How might Generation Z job seekers confidently make career decisions when access to workplace culture is so hard to find?
The culture of the workplace is very important, but 39% of job seekers don’t find the information needed.
We started with a list of assumptions but needed to validate these with our target users.
Generation Z placed workplace culture high on their list of priorities.
Surveys and a competitive analysis helped us understand the available landscape when searching for company culture while job hunting and gave us the background needed for user interviews.
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Apply to a company emphasizing a racially and ethnically diverse workplace.
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Might not have joined if had known more about the company culture.
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Did not find sufficient information about company culture online.
Importance of company culture
As the pie chart indicates, job seekers today feel that workplace culture is very important, matching our original assumptions.
Resources used to research company culture
Job seekers rely on employer review websites and the internet when searching for a company’s culture. We felt confident a digital product would be a good way to solve our problem.
To confidently create real solutions for users, I had to uncover their attitudes, perceptions, and current behaviors, and validate that they felt this was an important problem.
We used our pool of survey respondents for our user interviews.
“I want to see the profile of the company - like social media.”
Job seekers encounter six major pain points
User journey questions…
Could we increase the confidence of users making informed decisions about accepting a new position or even spending the time to apply to a position?
From our five interviewees, we extracted these six major pain points job seekers encounter when searching for the cultural characteristics of a potential employer. Only three of our team assumptions were included in the “user” top six:
Cultural characteristics are very important
Reviewer anonymity
Honest and reliable information
Our most promising insight really resonated and seemed to encompass all the pain points.
“I want to see the profile of the company - like social media.”
This was extremely helpful and allowed us to understand what Gen Z job seekers wanted and expected. We could plan the design around this idea to differentiate PEAK from other employee review websites.
Brainstorming by keeping at a glance top of mind
Users need to accomplish two types of goals to make the product worthwhile.
These two goals or “jobs” could be completed by the same user.
User #1
A Gen Z job seeker looking for information needs to understand quickly if a prospective company’s culture aligns with their own.
User #2
A Gen Z company reviewer wants to painlessly and anonymously leave reviews of their own workplace culture to give back to others in their same shoes.
The value proposition canvas prioritized our brainstormed features and allowed a better understanding of our users’ pain points.
It also provided a framework to confirm our product would meet users’ needs while reducing scope and would feed into creating user stories for our sprint planning.
A Gen Z job seeker looking for information about a prospective company’s culture.
USER #1:
A Gen Z company reviewer. There is no information for User #1 to discover if User #2 doesn’t leave reviews for others.
USER #2:
The Yelp solution…
Our user stories and task flows were iterated several times as we finalized two epics for our MVP. At the same time, I refined our branding and voice chart to help us effectively connect with our users through the UX writing.
Now we had a path to follow, and I could proceed with sketching and wireframing.
The main ideas to convey overall:
“No digging” for information
Like a “company profile” similar to social media.
The landing page addresses Gen Z’s main pain points
Users can quickly see and understand what options are available within the app.
Search for company reviews
Rate their current employer
No requirements to view ratings and reviews
Translated mockup for V1 protoype…
A “company profile page” conveys high-level “at-a-glance” information
An overview of company ratings could achieve the “Yelp” look.
Selecting the individual “characteristic” ratings to dig down for more detailed information.
Written reviews and comments for each “characteristic”
Anonymous and verified reviewers
Translated mockups for V1 prototype…
Testing both epics revealed that users were excited about PEAK, and wanted to used it when job hunting
Epic 1 prototype video: Searching for companies and reviews
Highlights from users during Epic #1 testing: Searching for company reviews
However, two issues could impact the overall experience and result in the loss of users.
Targeted UX writing and a light theme update reduced confusion and increased impact and engagement for users
V1
V2
Confusing instructions and lack of trust still persisted in EPIC #2
Epic 2 prototype video: Leaving a company review.
Highlights from users during Epic #2 testing: Leaving a review
Increasing reviewer trust regarding anonymity and job seeker trust with reviewer location and title
V1
V1
V2
V2
A literal “sprint” to launch the MVP ends with a longer backlog.
With only 4 days to deliver our MVP, we moved some features and details to the backlog.
Written review text area character countdown
Rating form progress bar
Hover state for characteristic ratings
Responsive screens for EPIC #2
Review form “help icon” descriptions
Footer page contents
The final MVP
The final MVP is a very “minimal” product, but still meets the two main MVP goals.
Job seekers finding information about a company’s culture
Leaving your current company’s rating and review for the community
Leave your anonymous company rating and review to help your community feel more confident when making career decisions.
Understanding workplace culture doesn’t have to be so hard.
Key learnings...
Creating a great user experience isn’t always about navigation and layout. You may lose your intended users if the content writing does not align with their goals or convey trust.
Acquiring new knowledge, understanding new facts, developing new skills, challenging what you already know, making mistakes, and iterating really do make your end product better.
It’s never too late to make a change. Whether you are pivoting your career or updating your UI components.
I found it important to always strive to be agile and be willing to improve whatever you are working on. It is even more satisfying when do it as a team.
The value of collaboration can’t be denied. I don’t think I understood the complexities of putting my designs into code or of the design hand-off until I did it with a team.
The feedback I received from Deise and Andrew was invaluable and pushed me to be more empathetic towards the dev team.
Team PEAK’S next steps
UI and Interaction cleanup
Integrate current backlog items
Cultural “characteristic” hover state
Progress bar for rating form
Footer Page contents
Review form “help icon” descriptions
Add error pages for all devices
Ensure WCAG compliance
Card sorting for “characteristics” categories
User testing on actual site (desktop and mobile)
Iterations as appropriate.
IMMEDIATE ACTIONS
DESCOPED FEATURES FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
Our initial research phase and usability testing sessions revealed many features that would be impactful for users.
Optional account creation
Create a “favorites” filter for “cultural characteristics” for faster discovery
Creation of “favorite” company listings that users are interested in
Networking option to discuss cultural aspects of a company’s workplace with current employees
Filter options for reviews by location or job position
More robust verification, such as using Linkedin authorization or other Oauth processes.
